Ep 31: Arianna Gayle & Adam Elsayigh – “Memorial”: a verbatim drama of loss

How do you tell people’s stories so they can say “Yes, you have heard me. That is what I want to say.” This is the second of two conversations on the development of the verbatim drama, “Memorial.” A play that, in a sense, gives permission for hard, suppressed questions about Muslims as “others” to be asked. And that speaks of loss in a way that can be understood across cultures and spaces and experiences.In the previous episode we spoke with Arianna Gayle Stucki. Today, via zoom, Arianna is joined by the play’s co-creator, Adam Elsayigh. Together they discuss the special, even idiosyncratic, process of how this play came together. That process brought together a team of volunteers, transcribing the recorded interviews and listening for pauses and inflections. This was not a process that fell back on AI or any machine generation but that process itself drew in a wider circle of people affected by the stories. The word clouds produced from the transcriptions pointed to the significance of the Māori whakatauki (or saying) on the most important thing in this world: "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata" – "It is people, it is people, it is people!"